Sparrow for Mac: a study in minimalist e-mail interfaces

Two developers have beaten a group of top indie Mac developers to building a …

Mac OS X users are about to have a new option for a native Cocoa e-mail client—as long as they use the IMAP protocol and prefer a very spartan user interface. Called Sparrow, the app's developers recently launched a public beta to get some feedback on the features and design. With over 20,000 downloads in just one day, the developers are scrambling to massage the beta into a 1.0 release and answer the massive flood of user feedback.

We spoke with Dominique Leca and Dihn Viêt Hoà about their motivation to create a Mac OS X e-mail client, fueled by innovative iPad apps and frustration with vaporware projects. We also spent a little time with the beta of Sparrow to check out its Twitter-influenced user interface.

DIY Project

Leca cofounded an iOS development studio in Paris two years ago and hired Dinh, a former Apple software engineer, to code for the company. Two years later, both left to pursue other opportunities and decided to collaborate on Sparrow as a side project. Neither were prepared for the project to be so popular.

"We were amazed by the way Sparrow was received, and we weren't imagining that it could make so much noise," Leca told Ars. "We're gearing up to make a final 1.0 version of Sparrow, thanks to the amazing feedback we have had."

When he was at Apple, Dinh had worked on iCal and later iSync. He was also heavily involved in the development of the open source e-mail library libEtPan.

That library was used to build an open source Cocoa wrapper called MailCore, designed to be the basis of a Mac OS X IMAP client called Kiwi. Unfortunately, Kiwi has yet to materialize as an actual software product. However, both etPan and MailCore have been used in other Mac and iPhone e-mail clients, such as reMail and Notify. In fact, MailCore was considered as an option for another e-mail client project that was launched earlier this year called Letters.

Dinh had followed the early initial rush of work on Letters, but wasn't happy with the choice of MailCore. He felt that as the main developer of etPan he could make a better library, which he calls etPanKit, and planned to offer its use to the Letters project.

However, Dinh's offer was ultimately turned down. "First, it was decided not to integrate this new engine and to write a new IMAP engine from scratch," he told Ars. "Secondly, Letters was going nowhere." Ars confirmed that little progress has been made since the initial flurry of discussions got the Letters project off the ground in January.

With etPanKit in hand, and Leca offering to work on UI design and marketing (he has a business degree from French business school HEC), the pair decided to make their own IMAP e-mail client. And they forged ahead "against most advice of Mac developers around us," Leca said.

"We kid a lot about it, but the Mac needs a great, alternative e-mail client, and in our coding fantasies we always talk about making the perfect one," Panic's Cabel Sasser told Ars back when Letters had just been announced. "What holds us back are only dumb, boring business things: it would take a lot of work, and we're not sure the return would be worth it."

The problem most developers fear is competing with Apple and "free"—Mail is already an adequate e-mail client for most users, and it comes free with every Mac.

But Dinh and Leca are prepared to put in the work to make Sparrow a viable alternative on Mac OS X. Leca said neither he nor Dinh have slept much since the initial beta was released earlier this week.

"Sparrow was a DIY project until it was released—the existing version is kind of a draft," Leca told Ars. "Now, given the way people have reacted, we'd like to 'professionalize' our approach and perfect the code and UI."

Leca said that many users have been filing very precise, very useful bug reports, and Dinh has been working diligently to address them. The current beta is very limited in both features and server compatibility—in fact, it only works with Google's Gmail. Dinh told Ars that Gmail has some quirks in its IMAP implementation, but it's also very popular, so he decided to focus on compatibility there for the initial beta. Several feature requests are already being worked on for the next beta, too.

Like Twitter, for Gmail

The main Sparrow window looks a lot like an iPad app.

The UI of Sparrow was heavily influenced by Twitter and Mail on the iPad. "We felt that the iPad mail app was almost perfect," Leca said, "and that we would like to have the same one on the Mac." He even asked Twitter developer Loren Brichter if the pair could use the "magnificent" sidebar design from Twitter, and Brichter gave them his blessing.

If you have used Tweetie for Mac or Twitter for iPad, you can see the influence right away. The largish icon buttons along the left side let you access your inbox, starred items, sent items, drafts, and trash. Along the top, a row of large icon buttons lets you compose, reply, archive, or delete. And you can easily search through all your mail, wherever it's filed.

Your mail is then listed in a column, much like tweets are in many Twitter clients, showing who it's from, the subject, and the first two lines of the body. This lets you quickly scan your e-mail and address the most important items. Then you can double-click any e-mail in the list to open the full text in its own window. Alternately, you can expand the window with a button on the bottom right; selected e-mails open in a preview pane to the right. All the actions also have easy keyboard shortcuts, many of which are identical to Mail, making it easy to use without taking your hands away from the keyboard.

You can expand the main window to include a preview pane on the right.

Right now preferences are very sparse. You can make Sparrow your default e-mail client, play a sound for new messages, and turn on Growl notifications. You can also add additional Gmail accounts, and switch between them using the sidebar on the main window.

Sparrow aims for simplicity, with few options for users to have to worry about.

Sparrow also includes a menubar icon. This turns blue when you have new mail, much like the menubar icon for Tweetie for Mac. From here you can bring Sparrow to the front or even directly open new unread mail.

The focus of Sparrow is to make e-mail a very minimal intrusion on other work, and to be a very simple and lightweight client. The design appealed greatly to Ars project manager Clint Ecker; if you feel, like he does, that "e-mail is a poison," then Sparrow's minimalist interface will definitely appeal to you. It encourages a workflow similar to the one used with desktop Twitter clients: check for new messages, quickly reply if needed, and get back to your other work.

In keeping with the simplicity theme, Sparrow has the bare minimum to write and send an e-mail. For some, this will fit in perfectly with their workflow.

Dinh has already implemented a few changes requested by users, such as adding a "reply all" shortcut and adding any signature above the reply history (a behavior more common among most e-mail clients). The next builds will add additional keyboard navigation, support for Gmail labels, and add support for IMAP services from MobileMe, Yahoo, and more. Browsing support for archives—a feature already built into the code but hidden in the UI—will be coming soon as well.

Dinh says that at a minimum, he would like to add support for MobileMe and an option to connect to arbitrary IMAP servers, support for Gmail labels, improve performance, and quash any outstanding bugs to prepare Sparrow for 1.0 status. However, neither Dinh nor Leca are ready to commit to a solid launch date.

To be certain, the current beta looks very promising. If you've been looking for something as an alternative to Mail, and are a current Gmail user, we recommend giving Sparrow a try. As with all beta software, there are some bugs and rough edges, but you may find that its unique approach to keeping e-mail management to the bare minimum suits your style of work better than feature-heavy clients like Mail or Entourage/Outlook.

This is an odd business model, to say the least. I'm honestly trying to think of any other popular commercial software packages which strip out functionality rather than add to it.

Improving usability is a worthy goal in its own right, but I suspect they're going to find it hard to convince consumers to pay for software which does less than the free alternatives. It's not like existing email programs are horribly cumbersome beasts which baffle everyone who tries to use them.

Judging from the screenshots I really dig the minimalistic UI (can't try the app since I don't do gmail). But man, that icon is way past ugly. Dear heavens above. Seems heavily inspired by the equally unsightly Tweetie app icon.

But functionality-/UI-wise, it definitely looks like it's worth keeping an eye on.

This is actually great, because all I use is Gmail Even at work. Yes, all 4 of my email accounts will do just fine here with this app. I only wish it had a RSS reader like Mail did, but that might complicate the UI...

Somewhat off topic but there's a lot to be said for the "iPhone style" UI on the desktop.

I recently wrote a UI toolkit for J2ME similar to the way the iPhone's works (one task per screen, one screen at a time) and, after finding it to be quite fast to use, rewrote it for the desktop. Having now used it in a Twitter client and even an IDE such a design really can make things faster to perform as long as you think about the "path" involved in doing things.

So, I'm all for this simple style of UI. And it does't mean you have to remove features, just think about where to "put" them a bit more...

I'll try this as soon as it support my MobileMe account. And while I do like using Safari for Mail, because it's quicker to switch to an app than it is to cycle through tabs is reason enough for me to have a dedicated app for email.

Edit: Also no issue with the icon. Selectable colours would be great since the Dock can quickly become a sea of blue and chrome, but if I were the dev, I'd take issue with Ars lopping the top and botton of the icon off.

The *biggest* feature of Sparrow in my eyes, and the one which makes it a serious contender for my email-enburdened future is the support for the Gmail-style conversation view. This is not the fake threading that every email client under the sun offers (think: Mail), this is actually a real, merged conversation view across your entire mail history, including messages you've sent, replies, etc, regardless of whether or not the messages happen to be sitting around in the same folder. This is absolutely huge.

Even if Sparrow doesn't make it, I hope that other mail client makers will take the hint on this particular feature. The conversation view is a fantastic innovation that has taken far too long to enter the general consciousness.

The *biggest* feature of Sparrow in my eyes, and the one which makes it a serious contender for my email-enburdened future is the support for the Gmail-style conversation view.

And that's the reason why I've been using it since it launched. With the built-in growl support, I've been able to drop Gmail Notifr and drop the two Chrome windows always open to my mail. All that's left now is labels, which they plan to address before 1.0.

This is an odd business model, to say the least. I'm honestly trying to think of any other popular commercial software packages which strip out functionality rather than add to it.

Don't know if it fits your definition of commercial software package but the PS3 keeps losing features I guess they do add some from time to time though...

Xavin wrote:

Meh, do we really need another desktop email client. At this point it's easier and faster to just use the web interface.

I'm not a mac user so I don't know how it works there, but trying to reply to a "mailto:" link on my PC using just the web interface requires me to copy the shortcut, switch web pages, paste the shortcut into the To: field, and then edit out the 'mailto:'. Using a desktop client would make that much easier I imagine.(If there is an easier way to do this on PC, please tell me...)

I like the simplicity of it, but it doesn't support anything but the inbox, which kills it for me. I make pretty heavy use of labels, and move most of my stuff out of emails (I use labels for context and the inbox as an "unsorted" folder). Add in label support and it'd be great.

michaelogaz wrote:

Using a desktop client would make that much easier I imagine.(If there is an easier way to do this on PC, please tell me...)

It uses, more or less, the same traditional email interfaces we've been with for ages. I dunno about you, but for me, Sparrow brings a fresh change of pace. If you find Sparrow to ramp your productivity with email skyward, then the current paradigm that email clients use today needs improvement / is dated.

It uses, more or less, the same traditional email interfaces we've been with for ages. I dunno about you, but for me, Sparrow brings a fresh change of pace. If you find Sparrow to ramp your productivity with email skyward, then the current paradigm that email clients use today needs improvement / is dated.

Am I missing something? The interface looks basically the same as every other mail client in existence (list of messages on the left, message text on the right).

It might be very clean and concise (both admirable qualities), but I'm not quite seeing how this is a productivity revolution, even if you don't use the full functionality of Outlook or Thunderbird or other desktop mail clients.

I'm not a mac user so I don't know how it works there, but trying to reply to a "mailto:" link on my PC using just the web interface requires me to copy the shortcut, switch web pages, paste the shortcut into the To: field, and then edit out the 'mailto:'. Using a desktop client would make that much easier I imagine.(If there is an easier way to do this on PC, please tell me...)

Right-click on the link, choose Copy email address, and there you go. Works in FF so YMMV.

I really like where they're going with this, and I hope they manage to stick with their goal of keeping it simple. That's the key feature for me. Unfortunately the threads I've seen on it, including this one, are already full of "Looks great, but I really want it to support $MY_PET_FEATURE_X". Too much of that and we'll end up right back where we started.

It's okay, I guess, but the UI is nowhere near responsive enough, and it somehow manages to run away with CPU and RAM. Why the hell does an email client need 980MB of RAM? I'll check out newer versions if they focus on performance issues, but until then, no thanks.

It uses, more or less, the same traditional email interfaces we've been with for ages. I dunno about you, but for me, Sparrow brings a fresh change of pace. If you find Sparrow to ramp your productivity with email skyward, then the current paradigm that email clients use today needs improvement / is dated.

Am I missing something? The interface looks basically the same as every other mail client in existence (list of messages on the left, message text on the right).

It might be very clean and concise (both admirable qualities), but I'm not quite seeing how this is a productivity revolution, even if you don't use the full functionality of Outlook or Thunderbird or other desktop mail clients.

Yes, you're missing something. You're missing the efficient use of horizontal columns in a two-dimensional grid to sort and visually group and distinguish your messages in a mailbox, replaced by a vertical list of "Twitter-ish" blocks, each one self-contained with their important attributes one below the other (Subject, Sender, Recipient, etc.).

I guess that it forces you to use the search/filter feature for grouping every time, as opposed than just quick scan and glance.

It's not like humans have any innate ability to deal with spacial and visual information efficiently.

On my Mac, I love Mailplane (http://mailplaneapp.com/) which essentially is a wrapper app for web-based GMail (albeit now a 20MB download...). It used to be very useful because it provided for drag and drop of attachments to GMail etc., and, because it's a wrapper app, it provided all of GMail's features out of the box. Now, GMail has many more features natively (in particular drag and drop), so Mailplane's return is diminishing.

As a side question: Is there anything like Mailplane for PCs? I'd really like to switch my parents from using IMAP GMail to "real" GMail, but with a native client instead of the Windows Live. Mostly for the calendar and address book integration they don't have.

I've been looking for a simple and easy windows email client for my elderly mom to use on her PC - its scary how complex and hard to use all the available software is. Even the simplest e.g. Thunderbird or postbox are kind of complicated for an old person prompting me to switch her to webmail. The iPad mail client would be ideal, why is there nothing like that on PC's?